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Guy Hands faces uphill struggle with Boots bid

AT 3pm last Thursday, a queue of 42 bankers and advisers filed into the offices of Terra Firma, the private-equity firm run by the financier Guy Hands.

There was a feeling of gloom among the group, many of whom avoided the banter to stare quietly out of the fourth-floor window across the Thames to the Tower of London and the City beyond.

Exactly seven days earlier, Hands had written to Sir Nigel Rudd, chairman of Alliance Boots, explaining that he planned to make a counterbid to the 1,040p per share offered last month for the chemist chain by the American buyout specialist Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and deputy chairman Stefano Pessina. And Hands had the backing of the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s biggest charity.

As the UK’s largest private-equity investor with about £6 billion in venture-capital and hedge-fund assets and an endowment of £13 billion, the Wellcome Trust’s credentials had to